I found I had aphantasia as a flow-on from something else I was investigating.
I have known for a long time that I had trouble watching movies because I lose track of who the characters are. My wife started watching Married at first sight and I got really confused with it. 3 of the ladies had the same shaped face, hair style and colour and I could not tell them apart at all. I searched on Google to find out why and found about Prosopagnosia.
Reading about this it mentioned it was common with aphantasia. I kept reading and it sounded more and more like fiction. This idea that people could see images, make sounds, imagine touch and actually feel it all. I asked my wife if it made sense to her, and she just looked at me like I was mad.
Doing more reading since, Iāve discovered I have SDAM as well as autism. Sometimes life would be amazing if we got an instruction manual for our minds.
I saw a video describing the term, and it all clicked. Before that I described it as my thoughts being only āconceptualā. I always struggled with therapy cause I couldnāt translate my thoughts into words. Havenāt gone since I discovered the term, but since then Iāve gotten a lot better at articulating my thoughts. Much moreso in text than verbally, though.
I have kinda always known that I donāt really work the same way as some others do, but the more recent discussions on just how well some people can visualize things led to me reevaluating myself.
I think a pretty big tipper for me was in how different my dreams are in comparison to my waking ability to visualize. Total night and day difference. When asleep (or just after waking) I have vivid and lucid dreams. While awake I canāt conjure a stick figure or a simple apple.
+1
Wanted to add that once I had some drug- and sleep-deprivation-induced hallucinations at a hospital, and I was shocked that I could āvisualizeā, in a similar way to how I dream, I guess. I had never had a comparable experience before.
So, do you have visual dreams? I saw the other thing you posted that stated that dreaming experiences (among other visual phenomena) tended to be muted amongst aphants. Do you find that to be the case for yourself?
Dreams (or, at least, recall) tend to be rare for me. Although melatonin (but not very reliably) tend to make it more likely for me to have vivid dreams (melatonin gave me the most vivid dreams ever too). But when I do [remember?] dream, they can be pretty vivid, I guess.
Which is a mind fuck for me, because I cannot prove it, as that would result in a paradox (I canāt visualize anymore while conscious).
Anecdotally, Iāve seen quite a lot of aphants saying they allegedly have vivid dream; the community seems split on this though.
Whatās your experience? edit: I saw you said you have vivid dreams, but are they frequent?
That little image with the apple.
I thought people meant it figuratively when they said they could visualize something. That image showed me most definitely not.
I think there was a youtube video by an artist years ago I watched. BOOM